The
event, which concluded Friday with a student summit at the James Union Building,
was created to provide MTSU students with entrepreneurial skills as well as opportunities
to network with established professionals in the nonprofit arena. See a video
from the summit at http://youtu.be/bK9zMS4edag.

—Claire Wilson,
marketing director for United Way of Rutherford and Cannon Counties.

Social
entrepreneur and author Miki Agrawal, a New York City native, met with honorees
in a special reception before her March 23 keynote presentation at the MTSU
Student Union to kick off the week of events.

Named
by Forbes magazine as one of 2013’s “Top 20 Millennials on a Mission,” Agrawal is
author of the book “Do Cool Sh*t,” which shares insights from her journey of
leaving a traditional job that she hated to founding the popular farm-to-table
pizza restaurant, WILD (formerly known as SLICE), in New York as well as
co-founding female garment company THINX while also continuing to branch into
other socially conscious business efforts that spoke to her personal passions
and purpose.

Agrawal’s
book, which at one point hit No. 1 on Amazon’s bestseller list, “had a lot of
practical business knowledge, written in a way that we thought would appeal to
college students,” so bringing her in as a speaker made sense, said Leigh Anne
Clark, associate professor of management in the Jennings A. Jones College of
Business and one of the event organizers.

Agrawal
told students that while surveys show that many millennials have felt the need
to move back in with their parents in recent years, the changing nature of the
economy has opened up promising opportunities for them to start their own
businesses. But to do so, she cautioned, students must identify their passion
and commit long term to turn that passion into a career.

“The
good news is that the barrier to starting a business, cause or community is
lower than ever before,” Agrawal told the crowd of over 200 inside the Student
Union Ballroom. “… Actually, we have the power to create our own reality. Isn’t
that exciting?”

The
week of events was hosted by the Departments of Management and Marketing and
Business Communication and Entrepreneurship in the Jones College of Business
and the Department of Communication Studies and Organizational Communication in
the College of Liberal Arts.

Agrawal’s
visit was made possible with support from MTSU’s Distinguished Lecture Funds,
Jones College of Business, College of Liberal Arts and the Jennings and Rebecca Jones Foundation.